Paris Is Always a Good Idea Read online

  “I think my walks with William Morris are enough for me,” she explained with a laugh.

  “Who’s William Morris? Should I be jealous?” René was concerned. (At that point he had not yet been in her shop, and he had no clue about William Morris the artist. But that was forgivable—after all, she didn’t know the name of all the bones and ligaments in her body, either.)

  She’d given René a kiss and explained that William Morris was her little dog, whom she—as the owner of a stationery store—had named after the legendary Victorian painter and architect, among other reasons because he had produced the most wonderful designs for fabrics and wallpaper.

  William Morris—the dog—was an extremely agreeable Lhasa Apso, and he was now almost as old as the postcard store. During the day he lay peacefully in his basket near the entrance; at night he slept behind the kitchen door on a blanket, and sometimes, when he was dreaming, his paws would jerk in his sleep and bang against the door frame. As the man from the animal shelter had explained to her when she got him, this small breed of dog was so particularly peaceful because they had in the past accompanied wandering Tibetan monks who had taken a vow of silence.

  René liked the Tibetan connection, and William Morris himself greeted the young man with the broad shoulders and big feet with a friendly wag of the tail when, after four weeks, Rosalie invited him into her apartment for the first time. Well … perhaps apartment wasn’t exactly the right word for that one poky little room over the store with only enough space for a bed, an armchair and wardrobe, and a big drawing table under the window. However, the room was extremely cozy, and Rosalie had only discovered its best feature after she moved in: through a second little window at the back of the building you could get out onto an area of flat roof that Rosalie used as a terrace in the summer. It was sheltered and secluded by old stone tubs with plants and a couple of weather-worn trellises, which were covered with glowing blue clematis in the summer, so that it was almost completely hidden from view.

  This was where Rosalie had set the table in the open air when René visited her for the first time. She was no great shakes as a cook—she was much more skilled with her pencil and brush than she was with a ladle—but on the rickety wooden table with its white cloth there were flickering tea lights in a variety of sizes, and there was red wine, pâté de foie gras, ham, grapes, a little chocolate cake, artichoke hearts drenched in lots of oil, salted butter, Camembert, goat cheese, and—a baguette.

  “Oh, my God!” René had sighed in comic despair. “Nothing but unhealthy stuff! Total overkill! You’ll come to a bad end. Someday your metabolism will collapse and then you’ll become as fat as my aunt Hortense.”

  Rosalie took a great gulp of red wine from her glass, wiped her mouth, and pointed her finger at him. “Wrong, my dear,” she said. “Nothing but delicious stuff.” Then she stood up and with a quick movement stepped out of her dress. “Am I fat, then?” she asked, dancing half-naked over the roof with graceful steps and flowing hair.

  René couldn’t put his glass down quickly enough.

  “Hey, wait!” He’d run after her, laughing, and eventually caught her. “No, you’re just right,” he’d murmured, his hands running sensuously over her back, and then they’d stayed on the roof, lying on a woolen blanket until the damp of the morning crept up on them.

  Now, as she stood in the gloomy hall, which always smelt of orange-scented cleaning fluid, and closed the mailbox, Rosalie thought back to that night on the roof with a degree of melancholy.

  In the past three years the differences between her and René had become more and more obvious. And where she had earlier sought and found common factors to unite them, she now saw everything that divided her from her boyfriend with all too much clarity.

  Rosalie loved breakfasting in bed; René had no time at all for “crumbs all over the bed.” She was a night owl; he was an early riser. She enjoyed her moderate walks with her little dog; he had bought himself a racing bike on which he sped like the wind through the streets and parks of Paris. When traveling was in question, nowhere was too far away for him, while Rosalie could not imagine anything more pleasant than to sit in one of the little old squares in the cities and towns of southern Europe and just watch the time go by.

  But what she most regretted was that René never wrote her letters or cards, not even on her birthday. “But I’m here,” he would say when she looked in vain for a card on the breakfast table on her birthday. Or, “But we can always phone,” when he was at one of his seminars.

  At the beginning Rosalie had still written him notes and cards she drew herself—for his birthday, or when he broke his foot and had to spend a week in hospital, or just when she was leaving the house on some errand or other, or when she’d gone to bed late at night and he was already asleep. “Hi, Early Riser: please be quiet and let your little night owl sleep in—I worked very late tonight,” she would write, and put a note with a little owl perching on a paintbrush beside his bed.

  She’d left her little messages all over the place: tucked in behind the mirror, on his pillow, on the table, in his sneakers, or in a side pocket of his carryall—but one day, she couldn’t really remember exactly when, she’d given up.

  Fortunately they each had their own apartment and a certain degree of tolerance, and René was a positive, life-affirming guy without any hidden depths to speak of. He seemed to her as calm as her little Lhasa Apso. And when they did occasionally quarrel (about little things), they always ended up in bed where their conflicts and frictions faded away in the soothing darkness of the night.

  When Rosalie spent the night at René’s place, which happened relatively seldom, because she liked to be close to her store and he lived in the Bastille Quarter, she would, just to please him, eat a couple of spoonfuls of the mush with the dried fruits and nuts that he kept on preparing for her with such enthusiasm—he never ceased to assure her that she would one day develop a taste for it.

  She would then smile half-heartedly and say “I’m sure I will, someday,” and as soon as he’d gone she’d scrape what was left in the muesli bowl down the toilet; then on her way to the store she’d buy a croissant, still warm from the oven, from a boulangerie.

  Still on the street, she’d tear off a hunk and stick it in her mouth, happy that such heavenly things existed. But of course she didn’t say a word about that to René, and since her boyfriend didn’t exactly have a lively imagination he would certainly have been astounded to catch his girlfriend in this little affair with a croissant.

  The croissant led Rosalie back to Monsieur Picard and his annoying rent increase. She frowned as she stared anxiously at the figures in the letter, which seemed quite threatening to her. Even if Luna Luna did by now enjoy a regular clientele, and there were always new customers and tourists who stopped outside the little stationer’s with its lovingly decorated display window, and then went in and, with exclamations of delight, picked up gift cards, pretty notebooks, or paperweights and never left the shop without buying something, Rosalie was still not in a position to live it up. There was no way of making big money with postcards and beautiful stationery these days, not even in the former literary quarter of Saint-Germain.

  Nevertheless, Rosalie had never regretted her decision. Her mother, who had eventually provided her with a little start-up capital out of her father’s estate, had in the end breathed a resigned sigh and said that of course she would do what she wanted anyway, and that it was at least better to run a store, no matter what kind, than to be a painter in free fall. But still, only a little better.

  Cathérine Laurent would probably never accept the fact that her daughter had not studied for a sensible profession. Or at least married an ambitious young (or, as far as she was concerned, older) man. (Oh please not that good-natured fitness trainer with the gigantic feet, so boring he almost brought her to tears!) Cathérine almost never visited her daughter’s store, and she told her friends from the genteel 7th arrondissement that Rosalie was now running an
office supplies store—that at least sounded a bit more serious.

  Well, “office supplies” wasn’t exactly right—in fact, it was totally wrong. You would search in vain for ring binders, staplers, hole punches, plastic folders, glue, in-boxes, and paperclips in the magical paper store that was Luna Luna. But Rosalie considered it superfluous to throw light on this confusion. She smiled and said nothing and felt happy every morning when she went down into her little store and pulled up the steel blinds to let in the sun.

  The walls glowed a gentle hydrangea blue. In the middle of the room stood an old, dark, wooden table on which many treasures were spread out: flower-patterned boxes containing all kinds of cards and envelopes; glazed ceramic mugs in delicate colors, produced by a local artist, in which there were pens decorated with patterned paper. Beside them, writing cases with old rose prints. Pretty scribbling pads and notebooks were piled beside writing paper and little boxes containing sealing wax and wooden stamps.

  In the bright shelves on the side wall there were rolls of luxury gift wrap and writing paper and envelopes shelved according to color and size; big rolls of gossamer gift ribbon hung down beside the little softwood table where the till stood, and on the blue painted back wall hung tiles with white doves, dark grapes, and pale pink hydrangeas—old motifs whose brightness had been restored by a thick layer of lacquer—and a large oil painting that Rosalie herself had painted, showing a little girl in a purple dress with streaming blond hair running through a fairy-tale wood. In the corner next to the till there was a tall, locked glass display case containing expensive fountain pens and silver letter openers.

  The display window was decorated with filigree card holders, which from a distance were reminiscent of bright patchwork quilts. Behind a rectangular pattern of silver wire twisted into heart shapes, a medley of all kinds of cards created an artwork of its own. Right behind them hung lengths of dark blue, turquoise, and reseda green gift wrap printed with William Morris’s exquisite patterns, and below all this there were cards laid out in fans and pretty card boxes with flower motifs or pictures of women at the seaside or reading books. Between them heavy glass paperweights rested on tissue paper in boxes: they had pressed roses in them, or etchings of old sailing ships, painted hamsa hands, or words and sayings that you could read every day without ever getting tired of them. There was the word PARIS painted in delicate brown brushstrokes on a background of chamois color. L’Amour ou La beauté est partout—“Love, or Beauty, is everywhere.”

  At least that was what the sculptor and painter Auguste Rodin had said, and when Rosalie looked around in her shop, she was happy to make her contribution to the abundance and beauty that life had to offer.

  What was really special about Luna Luna, however, were the handmade cards in the two revolving postcard stands, which stood just to the right of the door and only just fitted into the little stationer’s, although they were probably the most important things there.

  That the little store in the rue du Dragon had actually survived all these years was mainly due to Rosalie’s idea of the wishing cards. They were her specialty, and very soon word had gotten around that you could get handmade cards for every occasion—even the most unusual—in the Luna Luna stationer’s store.

  In the evening after closing time and late into the night Rosalie sat at her big table in the room above the store and drew and painted watercolor cards for everyone who still believed in the magic of the written word. They were enchanting miniature works of art on laid paper with deckle edges, with a sentence or a saying for which Rosalie thought up a picture. For example, “Do not forget me” was written in blue India ink, beneath which there was a drawing of a little woman with two suitcases offering the viewer an oversize bouquet of delicately stippled forget-me-nots. Or “Behind the clouds the sun is shining”—here you saw a sad-looking girl with a red umbrella on a rainy street, while on the upper edge of the picture little angels played ball with the sun. “When I woke up, I wished you were here” announced another card showing a stick figure looking longingly into the distance while sitting on a bed in the middle of a meadow blowing at a dandelion clock whose individual parachutes transformed into little spinning letters that formed the word yearning.

  Rosalie’s wishing cards, faintly reminiscent of Raymond Peynet’s drawings, sold like hot cakes, and after a while her first customers began returning with their own suggestions and ideas.

  Of course it was mostly the usual events (birthdays, get-well wishes, gift certificates, invitations, Valentine’s Days, weddings, and Christmas or Easter greetings), but again and again there were very special requests.

  Daughters wanted something for their mothers, mothers wanted something for their sons, nieces wanted something for their aunts, grandmothers something for the grandchildren, and women something for their female friends. But the most inventive wishes came from people who had fallen in love.

  Just recently a gentleman—no longer in the bloom of youth—with silver glasses and a very correct suit had come in to the store and handed in his order. He laboriously removed a piece of paper from his leather briefcase and laid it on the counter with some embarrassment.

  “Do you think you can do something with this?”

  Rosalie read the words on the paper and smiled.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “By the day after tomorrow?”

  “No problem.”

  “But it must be especially beautiful.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  That evening she had sat down upstairs at her drawing table, where, in the light of an old black metal lamp, pens, pencils, and brushes of all sizes stood in orderly rows in thick glass preserving jars, and had drawn a man in a gray suit and a woman in a lime-green dress holding hands and—borne aloft by four fluttering doves with blue ribbons in their bills—floating in the sky over Paris.

  Finally she had taken her drawing pen and written in elaborately curving script: “For the woman I long to fly with.”

  Rosalie couldn’t have said how many of these unique works she had produced over the years. So far all her customers had walked out of the wishing-card store satisfied, and she hoped that all their wishes had hit their target as surely as Cupid’s darts pierced the hearts of people in love. But as far as her own wishes were concerned, the lovely stationer had had much less luck.

  Every year on her birthday Rosalie went to the Eiffel Tower with a card she had painted herself. Then she climbed the 704 steps that led to the second platform and, with pumping heart (she was, as we have already mentioned, by no means an ambitious mountaineer), sent the card with her wish on it sailing through the air.

  It was an innocent little ritual that not even René knew about. Rosalie was generally a great believer in little rituals. Rituals gave some shape to life and helped to put the confusion inherent in existence in some kind of order and helped one stay in control of things. The first coffee in the morning. A croissant from the boulangerie. Her daily walk with William Morris. A little tarte au citron on every uneven day of the week. The glass of red wine when she closed up the store. The wreath of forget-me-nots when she visited her father’s grave in April.

  In the evening, as she drew, she always liked to listen to the same CDs. Sometimes it was Georges Moustaki’s smoky chansons, other times the lighter touch of Coralie Clément. Recently her favorite CD had been by the Russian musician Vladimir Vysotsky. She followed the sound of the songs—sometimes lyrical, sometimes virile—whose words she didn’t understand, while the music created pictures in her head and her pens flew over the paper.

  When she was a girl, Rosalie had kept a diary to record the things that she thought important. She hadn’t done that for ages, but since she’d opened the store, Rosalie had made a habit of writing down the worst and the nicest moment of the day in a little blue notebook. Only then did her day come to an end, and she could sleep peacefully.

  Yes, it was rituals that gave you stability and something to reliably look forward to. A
nd so every year Rosalie looked forward to the twelfth of December, when she stood on the top of the Eiffel Tower with the whole city spread out at her feet. She had no fear at all of heights—quite the contrary, she loved the feeling of distance, the free, open vista that allowed her thoughts to soar, and as her card fluttered away, Rosalie would close her eyes for a moment and imagine her wish coming true.

  Yet so far not one of her wishes had ever been fulfilled.

  The first time she’d climbed up there with a card, she’d wished for her favorite aunt, Paulette, to regain her health—at the time there was still a glimmer of hope that a complicated operation would be able to save Paulette’s eyesight. But although the operation went well, her aunt ended up blind.

  Another time she’d wished that she would win a competition for up-and-coming young illustrators. But the coveted prize, the book contract, and the prize money of over ten thousand euros went to a gawky young man who only painted palm trees and hares and was the son of a rich Parisian newspaper publisher.

  Before she’d met René and was living alone after a few rather disappointing relationships, she’d wished to meet the man of her dreams who would one evening take her up to Le Jules Verne—the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower, which had probably the most spectacular view over the whole of Paris—and then, when they were there, high up over the sparkling city, ask her the question of questions.

  This wish also remained unfulfilled. Instead, she met René, who literally ran into her one day on the rue du Vieux-Colombier, apologized a thousand times, and then dragged her into the nearest bistro to declare over a salade du pays that he’d never seen anything as beautiful as her. But René would rather have taken her on a trekking tour to Kilimanjaro than to an expensive—and in his view totally superfluous—restaurant on the Eiffel Tower. (“The Eiffel tower? Pur-lease, Rosalie!”)